【推荐1】When NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday, they marked the first successful rocket launch (发射) off American soil in nine years. However, it was also a first in their close ______ which has developed over their 20-year work at NASA.

“Being lucky enough to ______ with your best friend is some astronauts' wish and we're lucky enough,” explained 53-year-old Hurley.

The two astronauts had ______ the mission (使命), which saw them ______ land on the   International Space Station, over a two-year period. While they were friends before, in this time they could really see each other's weaknesses and ______.

And they're ______ that the experience made them even ______ together. So when they climbed into their space suits and the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, the two men were ______ not only in their technical skills, but in ______ that they'd have each other's backs.

Their close relationship has developed partly from shared ______ experiences. They both ______ women who played roles in space missions. Their ______ go beyond their wives' work. Both men ______ as they shared how their fathers were their first employers—and possibly their strictest ones. And the ______ of fatherhood is very important for both men: Behnken has a six-year-old son, Theodore, and Hurley has a 10-year-old son, Jack.

“My l0-year-old son thinks it's a cool spacecraft with a cool name. So I got the ______ from him and that' all that ______,” Hurley shared happily.

With the two astronauts living their ______ of heading into space as best friends, the mission will ______ end with the two of them landing safely into the cool waters of the Atlantic. After they ______ their work, they can share the ______ with their families together once they're back on Earth.

At work, the core function of the management is to make decisions on business operations and growth. _______ it is managing the workforce, servicing clients, _______ production, or hiring new employees, we see plenty of decision-making skills examples in everyday operations. Let’s understand the importance of decision-making better by looking at some examples of decision-making in management:

Imagine you are the CEO of an e-commerce start-up. Your work is expanding and you need to hire the right resources to help you _______ the vision of creating a leading online retail platform.

You would need to hire people who are experienced and adept in their _______ such as software development, marketing, operations, procurement, and logistics.

Since the business is an online start-up, you won’t need to hire _______ who work on the premises exclusively. You can also get talented location-independent workers _______ of delivering the required technical support and services online.

By ensuring an optimal mix of on-site and _______ workers, you can easily carry out the functions in a cost-effective way. Emails and chat communications as well as video interactions can keep the team spirit going. This will also give you the _______ of hiring talents that might be scattered over different geographic locations and can come together digitally to create _______ solutions.

At some point or the other in their journeys, most companies undergo rebranding. Usually, businesses are small ________ , with only local or regional reach and branding, but as they start ________ , the need for rebranding surfaces.

Quite often, logos, the company’s official mascots, and even names are changed to assert a new identity, capability, and vision. Rebranding activities are strong examples of decision-making skills that ________ company values, products, target audiences, cultural and social sensibilities, and business aspirations.

Such situations are common decision-making examples.

We just ________ some of the usual decision-making and problem-solving examples that are a part of most people’s professional lives. There could be more complex decisions that we would require to take in the ________ of our careers. Sometimes these can be individual decisions such as hiring or firing an employee or ________ decisions such as opening a new office.

【推荐3】As a reading specialist at an elementary school(小学), I work with many children who experience difficulty in reading. While there are obvious _______ during the year when students make great progress, there are also many _______ periods as well, when we, as teachers, want to find out why our students aren’t _______. Recently, I had an experience which allowed me a _______ chance to understand what goes on in the mind of a struggling reader.

Earlier this summer I _______ a bad concussion(脑震荡)while riding my bike. One _______result of my concussion was that I lost all short-term and some long-term _______ for a period of days. The days before and after the _______ seemed a blur(模糊)as the world went on around me.

People seemed to be _______ extremely quickly, and I struggled to __________conversations. Jokes were not __________ at all. Once I began trying to read the newspaper, but much to my disappointment, I realized that I couldn’t __________ any of what I read. I could know the words, but couldn’t understand the meaning. As I read, the words didn’t __________ pictures in my mind. I was reading each sentence slowly, then carefully setting it aside. The words had no __________, produce no images, and were simply words. By the time I finished the __________, I had built nothing in my mind. They were simply words __________ past my eyes, and I suddenly realized that this is how my student read!

I am just so __________ that this is a temporary condition. I have a much clearer __________of what struggling readers are __________. I remember that there are so many students out there, for whom reading is __________ so puzzling. We must reach them before they give up.

【推荐3】The number of the best

How big should a business team be? It is an enormously important issue for companies. Teams that are too small may _________ the skills required to get the job done; teams that are too big may be impossible to co-ordinate.

Similar trade-offs may apply when it comes to firms as a whole. Start-ups are often short of staff. The founders must play a host of different _________, from obtaining finance to product development and marketing, for which they may not be equally suited. But the _________ is that they can have highly collaborative working environments.

People who have worked for start-ups say the culture changes when the company reaches a certain _________. Patty McCord, formerly of Netflix, referred to the “stand-on-a-chair number”—the biggest group that can easily hear the boss _________ them.

Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist (人类学家) at Oxford University, has done a lot of work on primate groups. His argument is that the size of the group is linked to the size of the brain. With their large brains, humans can cope with larger bands. A larger social group has many advantages, _________ greater protection and specialisation.

Whereas 150 is sometimes referred to as the “Dunbar number”, the academic himself in fact refers to a range of _________. He observes that humans tend to have five intimate friends, 15 or so good friends, around 50 social friends and 150-odd acquaintances.

Running a larger network can be difficult. So much time is needed to maintain relationships that their quality inevitably _________. The armed forces have spent millennia experimenting with unit size. A Roman centurion (百人队长) oversaw 100. The modern American army company has 180 members. Britain’s equivalent numbers 120.

These are rough estimates, rather than rigid figures. But it is striking that many group activities seem to be _________ a Dunbar number. The Special Air Service, Britain’s elite fighting unit, has four-man patrols; when your life depends on it, you need to have absolute ____________ in your colleagues. As a result, such groups are limited in size.

Sports-team sizes ____________ the playing area. There are five players in a basketball side and six in ice hockey; outdoors there are 11 players in football and cricket teams, and 7-15 in the various forms of rugby. Perhaps this is the optimal size for coaching purposes, or perhaps crowds would ____________ to distinguish individual players if teams were larger.

Small work teams may also tend towards these two size ranges. “If you want a committee to ____________ something, limit it to four to five people,” says Mr Dunbar. “But to brainstorm in a meeting, you need 12-15.” Many companies use “agile” teams which draw employees from across the company; they tend to have between five and nine members.

The modern company may settle on a ____________ with a small group of “core” workers and a larger group of contract workers. The result may be more ____________ within the core staff but the non-core staff may be less well treated. The small core teams may work effectively. The big question will be the effect on morale of those outside those teams.